5 problems with the 2014 general elections...

Booth capturing was such a menace during elections in India decades back that in 1989 it was made into a specific offence under the Representation of the People Act. Electronic Voting Machines made it tougher for poll rigging.

In fact the 1990-96 tenure of Chief Election Commissioner TN Seshan was a landmark one and elections in India began to get streamlined and problems began to vanish after that. However the 2014 Lok Sabha polls have seen quite a lot of problems.

A look at some of them…

1. Too long: The 2004 general elections lasted 21 days. The 2009 one lasted 28 days. The 2014 one broke all records and was spread over a whopping 36 days. If we are getting older as a Republic and the Election Commission is getting more and more modernized, then why are we taking so long to conduct elections?

Things have become streamlined and there are no longer heavy ballot boxes to be lugged around with all those physical votes. Imagine if 50 crore people voted and all of them had their paper votes counted and re-counted, then you could have expected a long election.

Such long elections serve no purpose and there even was a Twitter conspiracy saying that the elections were spread out so long so that the so-called Modi wave would die down mid-stream and not sustain itself till the end.